Akamai reports what we already know: US broadband not so hot

It's no surprise that average broadband speeds in the US don't measure up to, …

Washington is the slowest state in the US when it comes to broadband connectivity speeds, and... Oklahoma is one of the fastest? Don't adjust your browsers: it's all true, according to the data in Akamai's first (and presumably quarterly) State of the Internet report. The firm gathered data across its entire global server network between January and March of this year to look at Internet usage trends, and its findings reinforce the fact that the US still has a way to go in order to catch up with our friends across the pond when it comes to broadband speeds.

Internationally, South Korea came out on top for having the highest level of "high broadband" (faster than 5Mbps) connectivity. 64 percent of the country fell into this category, compared to 48 percent in Japan, and 35 percent in Hong Kong. The US came in seventh on the list with only 20 percent. Within the US, the states that had the greatest levels of high broadband were Delaware, Rhode Island, New York, Nevada, and Oklahoma. In regards to Delaware and Rhode Island, Akamai acknowledges that their small size contributed to their ranking on the list. "Given the relative size and population density of both states, as well as their proximity to major East Coast cities, it is not entirely surprising that they show such high levels of broadband connectivity," reads the report.

The US fares even worse when it comes to just "fast" connectivity (greater than 2Mbps). South Korea came in first again with 93 percent, followed by Belgium and Switzerland. The US ranked at number 24 with "only" 62 percent of the country having access to broadband speeds of over 2Mbps.

Rwanda, the Solomon Islands, Ethiopia, and Cuba were among the slowest countries, with the majority of connections occurring below 256Kbps (Akamai points out that the most remote countries have speeds significantly below that). The firm said that 97 percent of Rwanda's connections to Akamai fell into this category, and that the highest percentage of slow connections came from remote Pacific islands or from the African continent. When it comes to the US, Washington state (and home of tech giants such as Microsoft) was the slowest with 21 percent of the state's connections at under 256Kbps. Other slow states included Virginia, Washington, DC, Georgia, and my home state of Illinois. (Luckily, I am not one of those people.)

Security

The State of the Internet report also looked at other traffic on the Internet, such as DDoS attacks and hacking attempts during the first quarter of the year. The largest chunk of attack traffic originated from China at almost 17 percent, with the US close behind at just over 14 percent. The top 10 countries in the list (which also included Taiwan, Venezuela, Argentina, Brazil, Japan, South Korea, Turkey, and India) were responsible for about three-quarters of all attacks, Akamai said.

Almost a third of those attacks were on port 135, also known as the Microsoft RPC port used for remote procedure calls. The second most common attacks were on NETBIOS, often used for Windows network shares. "One interesting observation about the ports that see the highest levels of attack traffic is that they were targeted by worms, viruses, and bots that spread across the Internet several years ago," wrote Akamai. "While that's not to say that there are not any current pieces of malware that attack these ports, it may point to a large pool of Microsoft Windows-based systems that are insufficiently maintained, and remain unpatched years after these attacks 'peaked' and were initially mitigated with updated software."